Update: A September 15 New York Times story reports that stories of gun-toting Venezuelan migrants taking over an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado, are false. However, the story also reports:
- Regarding a viral video showing armed men storming an Aurora apartment building, the Times says, “The incident was reported as a connection to gang violence, particularly the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though documentation was scarce.”
- The company that owns the apartments, CBZ, through its public relations agent, told the media that, “An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area. The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”
- The Times story claims this is “a false story, fueled by real problems,” namely that the CBZ apartments have descended into squalor and the city has been fighting to get them cleaned up. The story quotes a resident as saying many there are squatters. The article also says Aurora officials have indicated there are “criminal elements” in the apartment buildings, but not widespread gang activity.
- Recently Aurora police arrested 10 Tren de Aragua gang members on an array of charges including felony menacing, attempted first-degree murder, assault, child abuse, and domestic abuse. In the Times story, there was no mention as to whether these gang members were residents of the Aurora apartments that received so much media attention; however, according to a police report, some of the crimes were committed at CBZ-owned Fitzsimons Place apartments, which the city of Aurora recently closed due to code violations.
Separately, the Aurora mayor and a council member issued a statement that included this comment about Tren de Aragua (TdA):
“As for the perception and reality of public safety in Aurora, please understand that issues experienced at a select few properties do not apply to the city as a whole or large portions of it. TdA has not ‘taken over’ the city. The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true. Again, TdA’s presence in Aurora is limited to specific properties, all of which the city has been addressing in various ways for months.”
Original story continues below.
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City officials in Aurora, Colorado, are closing down a large apartment building today amid claims about landlord abuse and reported gang crime, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua migrant street gang.
“Tren de Aragua taking over properties and communities in Aurora means that we are not able to be present on this property, or any of our other properties in similar situations, also being impacted by [migrant] gang presence,” said a statement to Breitbart News by an “investor for multiple affected properties in Aurora.” The statement was provided by a spokesman for the Florida-based landlord, CBZ Management.
The owners are “out-of-town slum lords,” Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman responded via 9News.com on August 8:
That building has been a problem for years, mountains of garbage, rats, sewage, no electricity …. We’ve been working with this building and its owners for a very long time. I mean, I they’re they’re out-of-state slumlords, and they haven’t maintained the building.
Coffman is a prominent supporter of more labor migration into the city’s workplaces and housing. “America is a nation of immigrants with a rare ability to take the best of many cultures from all corners of the world and almost magically integrate them to become uniquely American,” he told ColoradoPolitics.com in 2020. One in five of Aurora’s population of 400,000 is an immigrant.
The tenants must leave by Tuesday. Many will get free accommodation at local hotels until August 31, mostly arranged via pro-migration advocacy groups, such as the East Colfax Community Collective.
ABC7 in Denver reported:
Edwin Macedo, who is new to the country, said he struggled when he first arrived to the U.S. — moving from different shelters and eventually found himself living on the street in Denver. “We used to live in an encampment under a bridge,” he said, in Spanish, “This is the only roof I have right now.” He and his children are now left wondering where they will go next.
But many have learned from progressive advocacy groups to demand free aid from ordinary Americans:
“We don’t want to go to a shelter, we have been through too much to go back to a shelter and give our kids that life,” said [another] tenant, Irany Perez, in Spanish, “We are demanding our human rights, we are humans and this is not fair.”
Migration
Since 2021, roughly 40,000 illegal migrants have flooded into Denver and its surroundings, including such as Aurora, because the local Democratic mayor promised sanctuary, free housing, and economic aid. The inflow has been welcomed by the employers, landlords, and groceries who gain from the imported extra workers, renters, and consumers.
Biden’s surge has pushed up housing prices, making it even more difficult for migrants — and many Americans — to earn a living.
The evicted migrants were paying $1,200 per month for one-room apartments, even though many could not work legally.
The migrants, including many from Venezuela, were helped into the country by Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. He was supported by Vice President Kamala Harris, who declined Biden’s offer of a central role in the nation’s immigration policy.
Aurora police Deputy Chief Chris Juul acknowledged that the Venezuelan Tren De Aragua gang is active in the area. “We’re working diligently on that … We are learning a lot about this community,” according to an August 9 report by Colorado Public Radio.
“This happening in Denver and other big cities, and it’s happening in rural areas,” responded Jay Palmer, a trafficking expert and former advisor to President Donald Trump. Apartment buildings, he told Breitbart News, are:
being taken over by the migrant gangs, and the illegal workers have to pay upwards. I equate this almost to the 1920s, 1930s Mafia trend [of protection rackets]: You give them a part of your salary, and you’re alright. The police won’t do anything. Nobody will do anything.
This comes straight from a high-ranking law enforcement official who told me: When they put you through the academies, you are not taught … immigration law. You know burglary, robberies, homicide. You don’t know these [immigration] laws and it takes a scholar to keep up with the laws because a lot of them change. Every [migrant] has got a cell phone, everybody’s got a camera, and law enforcement officers are afraid they’ll be prosecuted by the left.
The Florida landlord has been urging more police action for months, according to the PR agency. “I told them time and time again, if you guys only took this seriously eight months ago, nine months ago, you probably could have stomped it out with relative ease,” the landlord told Colorado Public Radio.
The PR company for the landlord told Breitbart News:
The property owners have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into repairing and upgrading the building in the past several years, and on November 2, 2023, we received a full code compliance sign-off on our improvements, with the next inspection scheduled for July 2024. Over the course of due process, and given our inability to have a presence at the building due to the danger, we received no prior notice of the July 2024 inspection ever taking place. It is irresponsible to categorize this act of organized terror as the result of code violations when it is understood by several local and federal agencies that this gang has overtaken several apartment complexes in the area.
We would like to be able to resume normal operations at our buildings, but we cannot do so under the threat of present and immediate danger against residents, staff, and management. This is an issue our city needs to face head-on with law enforcement and the further support of our state and country’s leaders to protect affected tenants, the surrounding communities, and Americans across the nation.”
The three GOP members of the city council back the landlord’s argument that their maintenance crews could not visit the 99-unit building because of extortion threats from the Venezuelan gang members. “None of us buy [the Mayor’s] story that this is based on a code enforcement violation,” said Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, according to Colorado Public Radio. “Three [council members] believe there is a huge gang problem,” she added.
Denver city’s sanctuary laws are encouraging migrant crime that is spreading through the city’s apartment buildings and into the suburbs, said John Fabbricatore, a former ICE officer who is now running against incumbent Rep. Jason Crow (R-CO). He continued:
The police department wasn’t responding to every misdemeanor call … They were not contacting ICE and were just letting [criminal migrants] back on the street. That’s a recipe for disaster, and they allowed the problem to fester. They weren’t getting rid of the [criminal] people, or arresting or jailing the people that were committing these crimes, or having them deported. And I feel that some of these gangs just became emboldened. There was no real deterrent for them, and they felt that they could extort people in these apartment complexes because most of the people in these apartment complexes — I would say over 90 percent — are undocumented immigrants.
They are extorting cleaning crews that go in there. Maintenance can’t go in to clean without paying. If you go to pick up the trash there, you can’t pick up without paying. The tenants have to also pay them, not just the management company. Any empty apartments that are in there, they’re squatting and using them as drug locations
The gangs “are preying on illegal immigrants in these apartment complexes because the [non-gang] illegals won’t speak up, and they’re afraid to speak up,” he added.
The hidden crime by migrants is often ignored by pro-migration groups who insist that police arrest Americans at a higher rate than migrants and that migrants commit murder at lower rates. “There is no migrant crime surge,” claimed a July 18 article by German Lopez, a New York Times reporter. He added:
New York, Chicago and Denver have had an influx of immigrants in the past couple years. Over that same period, murder rates in those cities have fallen.
Local politicians are also pressuring local journalists to ignore and hide migrant crimes, said Fabbricatore. “You’ll notice that the media never says that the people arrested are from Venezuela or other countries — they always list them as “Aurora residents,” he said, adding “They are so afraid of showing that sanctuary status is not safe for American citizens and their whole argument is that sanctuary status is safe for everybody because it keeps ICE out of the communities.”
The migrant crime will bleed into the suburbs, he warned:
When more young suburban kids start dying of overdoses, as more homes are broken into and more cars are stolen from driveways, people will start to realize that the criminal element doesn’t stay in the inner city. [Downtown migrants] will dry up all their resources, and they’re going to ask where’s the money? It’s in the suburbs!
The desperate migrants are also being hired by employers for jobs that would otherwise pay decent wages and help Americans rise from poverty, buy homes, and start families, he said.
But the suburban voters are not yet ready to deal with the civic damage from their casual tolerance for illegal migration, he said.
“I can’t break that cycle during this congressional race — it is going to take years to break the narrative that you can’t be against illegal immigration because it’ll make you a racist, where you can’t be against wanting to hold people responsible and put them in jail because it makes you a racist,” he said.
“Until people start to think that way, we’re not going to have change,” he said.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated.
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